Elopement takes on new meaning; Couples opting for elaborate weddings without the bother of inviting guests

It was minutes before the wed-ding, and the planner left nothing to chance. The reception hall, a plank-floored farmhouse in the Santa Barbara, Calif., wine country, had been decorated in peonies. The dinner menu, rendered in calligraphy, promised wild mushroom tortellini and halibut with verjus. In a field out-side, a photographer and videographer stood at the ready, near a ceremonial canopy draped in velvet and the aisle strewn with guinea feathers.

The only thing missing were guests. But that's exactly what Carey and Brian Provost had planned.

"I wanted the dress, the vows, the flowers and the pictures," said Carey Provost, 36, who took the unconventional step of turning the couple's elopement into a blowout. "But when you have guests, we felt like it ends up being more for them, not for the bride and groom. We wanted it to be for us."

An extravagant elopement might strike some as a contradiction. Isn't the whole point of eloping to steer clear of the Wedding Industrial Complex, to keep things simple and cheap?

But elopements are no longer con-fined to black-sheep members of the family who skulk off to a Las Vegas chapel because Mom and Dad do not approve. With the cost of a 200-guest wedding spiralling upward, and many people getting married (and remarried) at ages when they no longer feel a need to be the stars of their Big Day, couples are now considering a table for two as a civilized alternative to 12 months of planning hell.

Still, they want the day to be special. This is particularly true in an era when wedding blogs and Facebook photos have made nuptials a public spectacle. Why shell out for an-other rubber chicken dinner for Aunt Beatrice from Tuscaloosa, Ala., when what really matters are the luscious photos capturing the style and pageantry, which can be "liked" and "pinned" on social media sites?

It is a way to have your wedding cake and eat it, too.

"It was almost like a glorified photo shoot for the two of us," said Provost, who lives with her husband in San Antonio. "We got to spend the whole day together, just the two of us, which almost made it more meaningful. There wasn't a distant cousin, mother or girlfriend adding stress."

The impulse to avoid stress is often the starting point. A year ago, Celia Tombalakian, a global marketing director for a medical devices company in New York, found herself mired in planning for a traditional ceremony at the University Club with her fiancé, David Shafer, a 37-year-old plastic surgeon.

"The details kept snowballing," Tombalakian, 40, said. "Finally we thought: Why are we buying in-to this? We have been sucked into the machine. Let's just do our own thing."

They decided to run off to Las Vegas - in high style.

"I didn't want it to be a drive-thru, Britney Spears kind of thing," Tom-balakian said. "How do you get the best of both worlds?"

The answer: Arrange an elopement with all the production values of a fairy-tale wedding. The couple hired a wedding planner, Andrea Eppolito, who booked them a corner suite of the Cosmopolitan hotel, with a wraparound balcony over-looking the Bellagio Fountains. She found the location, a private garden located on a nearby lake, hired Your Beauty Call - a company that provides hairstyling and makeup for celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton - to style Tombalak-ian. And she reserved them a window table at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant, which served a miniature three-layer cake for two.

"We felt like guests at our own wed-ding," Tombalakian said. "We were driving around that morning, saying, 'Isn't it amazing how nothing can go wrong?' "

While an extravaganza like that is never going to be cheap, a ceremony for two invariably saves money over a ceremony for 200 (consider the catering costs alone). And in this economy, savings matter, said Jen Campbell, who runs Green Wed-ding Shoes, a wedding blog that has featured several ambitious elopements.

"For a couple fresh out of school, paying for a large wedding probably isn't possible without considerable support from parents," she said.

Still, fancy elopements, or "private ceremonies," as wedding professionals sometimes call them, can cost $10,000 to $100,000. (By contrast, the average wedding costs $26,000, according to a recent study by Brides magazine.)

But for older couples, particularly busy professionals, money isn't al-ways the only consideration. For them, priorities have often shifted.

"Clients getting married in their 20s say, 'I want to be in front of 200, I want to be a princess bride,' " said Lisa Vorce, a wedding planner in Los Angeles.

Brides older than 30 are past the stage in life where they demand that their wedding day be the definitive day of their life - part family reunion, part college reunion, with a dash of royal wedding mixed in, she added.

"They just want a special thing with their significant other," Vorce said. "It's kind of like this glorified honeymoon."

To fill that market, hotels and re-sorts in wedding-friendly locales like the Napa Valley or the Caribbean offer elopement packages co-ordinated by a full-time wedding consultant.

And the more spectacular the set-ting, the better. Whereas eloping couples in the past may have limited themselves to recording the event for a personal scrapbook by taking a few snapshots with a disposable camera, many now hire top photographers, knowing in advance that the photos will at the very least find a public audience on Facebook, if not on wedding blogs.

To be considered for such blogs, however, design matters. That means styling an elopement as ambitiously as any other wedding.

Shalini Saycocie, an art producer for a New York advertising agency, was planning to elope with her fiancé, Chad Carbone, for a more intimate experience. She was inspired to create a mountaintop fairy tale of their own after seeing sumptuous photos of the Provost ceremony on the blog Style Me Pretty. She enlisted a planner in Eagle, Colo., Frosted Pink Weddings, to arrange a ceremony at Devil's Thumb Ranch in the Rockies last December.

After a private ceremony, which was held next to a fireplace covered in hyacinths, the couple retreated to an outdoor ice rink just as the sun was setting. There, James Christianson, a prominent wedding photographer, snapped away as Carbone, wearing a 1920s-style ball gown and a vintage beaver wrap, circled the ice with her new husband, against a backdrop of snow-dusted mountain peaks. After-ward, they set off sparklers and posed some more for the camera. The photos ran on Ruffled, another popular wed-ding blog, a few months later.

"The visual aspects were especially important for me, since our family wasn't there with us," Carbone explained. "I wanted someone else to be the eyes for our friends and family."

Having no guests also frees up what couples can afford to do for their wedding.

Quinn Ly, 28, a law-firm manager in San Diego, and Andy Van Le, a lawyer, decided to keep things small yet spectacular. Last month, they travelled to Vietnam with their wedding planner, Vorce; a floral designer, Mindy Rice; and a photographer, Aaron Delesie, to stage an elaborate ceremony amid the 14th-century temple ruins at My Son. The planner and florist served as witnesses.

"We had the rehearsal dinner, the hair and makeup, the cake cutting, the vow exchange," Ly said. "We had everything but the guests."